J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

sir robert holmes

Incoming Angel, Part 2

by

The publication of Death’s Bright Angel, the new Quinton novel, is getting ever closer, so here’s another ‘teaser trailer’ for the book! This describes the destruction of the Dutch merchant shipping in the Vlie anchorage on 9 and 10 August 1666 (Old Style; 19 and 20 August on the calendar used by the Dutch, so the publication of this blog post falls neatly between the two sets of dates). This action, now all but forgotten in Britain, certainly isn’t forgotten in the Frisian Islands, where the 350th anniversary is being commemorated this month. My description of events in Death’s Bright Angel is based closely on the actual accounts of the attack: the Dutch losses were colossal, totalling some 150 merchant ships and cargoes worth over £1 million. For a moment, it seemed as though the ‘consequences’ that Matthew Quinton refers to early in this extract might become a reality – the collapse of the Amsterdam stock exchange, and perhaps a political revolution which might lead to the Dutch suing for peace. Not surprisingly, many contemporaries looked back and wondered whether the Great Fire of London, which took place three weeks later, was revenge for what the Dutch still call ‘the English Fury’.

What’s that you say? Does the plot of Death’s Bright Angel have anything to do with those rumours?

To coin a phrase: you may very well think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.

 

***

SPOILER ALERT – the following extract contains an important spoiler for those who haven’t yet read the fifth Quinton book, The Battle of All the Ages. Otherwise, read on!

 

‘Make for the furthest line of ships!’ I ordered.

‘Aye, aye, Sir Matthew!’

We were passing between row after row of hulls, sometimes four or five deep, some lashed together, most at individual moorings. But I knew two things. First, there was no point starting with the nearest ships; the wind was south-westerly, so we needed to start setting fires at the far end of the fleet, then work back, so that the breeze would do much of our work for us. Second, the ships furthest away for us were the ones most likely to try and make a run for the open sea; and so it proved. We emerged from between two rows of flyboats to see Holmes signalling from the Fanfan, while beyond, what looked to be a Guineaman, three privateers, and five more flyboats, were putting on sail and starting to move away toward the south-east, into a narrow channel between the Vlie island itself and some small inlets that lay between it and the mainland.

I looked across toward the Fanfan. Holmes was pacing the deck, jumping up onto the wale, shaking his fist and screaming inaudible obscenities at the fleeing Dutchmen. But he was a good enough seaman to know the reality of the situation. Finally, he went back to the stern of the yacht, waved across to the water to me, raised his hands as if to say ‘it matters not a jot’, and pointed back towards the hulls behind us. Nine had got away, but that still left over one hundred and fifty ships to burn. And in one sense, it was good that some of the Dutch had escaped. They would carry the news to Amsterdam of what the English had done at the Vlie, and God willing, that news would bring the consequences we all hoped for. So we left the fleeing Dutchmen to their own devices, put over the helms of our boats, and made for the ranks of ships in the Vlie anchorage.

***

‘Every ship to be fired!’ I ordered, as I climbed aboard a Baltic flyboat laden with grain from Poland.

In truth, my order was nearly as redundant as the fireballs. Every seaman knew how to fire a ship, and how to extinguish such a fire: countless vessels were lost to accidental blazes, so fire was one of the most feared of all the many hazards of the sea-business. Thus it was simply a case of men doing what they were always specifically ordered not to do, such as igniting straw below decks, laying a powder fuse to a tar barrel, and so forth.

As we pushed off from the flyboat and the oarsmen took up their strokes, I saw the first flames spit from the upper deck of the ship. It is remarkable how quickly a hull burns; soon, the whole vessel was ablaze from stem to stern. The breeze carried the flames into the rigging and upperworks of the ship secured alongside it, and in short order, that, too, was a roaring conflagration. So onward, through the entire fleet. It was slow work, but with no resistance at all, it was easy work, too. My men moved from hull to hull, methodically placing setting fires wherever they would cause the most damage. I looked across to the other groups of ships in my view. On all of them, Englishmen were engaged in the same work, firing their fuses and fireballs, getting back into their longboats, and rowing to the next batch of vessels. We cut the cables of many of the Dutch ships – in some cases, their own crews had already done so – so that burning hulls drifted against others, firing them in turn. Some ships burned more readily and fulsomely than others, depending on the nature of the cargoes they carried, but burn they all did, sooner or later. By the early evening, the entire Vlie anchorage was a carpet of flame, the smells of burning wood and scores of cargoes, from spices to pinewood to saltfish, putting me in mind of a vast kitchen. Guinea ships, Turkey Company ships from Smyrna and Scanderoon, Russia traders from Archangel, Balticmen from Danzig and Riga, flyboats laden with French wines from La Rochelle or Bordeaux, timber cargoes from Norway – all of them blazed away, sending a vast pall of smoke into the air. Even on the quarterdeck of the Black Prince, at anchor in Schelling Road some considerable distance from the seat of the fire, the heat warmed the faces of Kit Farrell and I as we watched the great merchant fleet perish. Against the setting sun, it looked like Hell itself.

‘A fine day’s work, Sir Matthew,’ said Kit.

‘Indeed, Captain Farrell. The Dutch hit in the only place where they truly feel pain – their pockets.’

‘And would you say that in the hearing of your wife?’

I laughed. Until only very recently, Kit would never have dared to make such a quip at my expense. But in many respects, we were equals now, and he, who knew Cornelia very well, was finally starting to come to terms with the fact.

‘Sakes no, Kit. Even if she were on the point of giving birth, she would beat me black and blue for insulting her countrymen so.’

Little did I realise how prescient both Kit’s question and my mocking response to it would prove to be.

At length, with the flames still raging all across the Wadden Sea, we went below for a supper of salt beef and execrable claret. Kit then went back on deck to take the middle watch, while I retired to my pallet in his cabin. It would be an early start on the next morning, when we were to execute the second part of the attack.

 

Want to know what happens in ‘the second part of the attack’, and how the plot of Death’s Bright Angel connects ‘Sir Robert Holmes, his bonfire’ to the Great Fire of London? Pre-order the book now – not long to wait!

Vanished Empires

by

‘The Journals of Matthew Quinton’ are set principally during what are known as ‘the Anglo-Dutch wars’, but like most generalisations used to describe historical periods, that label actually conceals a much more complex picture. For one thing, the wars were not exclusively Anglo-Dutch: the second, from 1665 to 1667, also involved France, Denmark-Norway and even the Prince-Bishop of Munster, while the third, from 1672-4, was part of a much larger conflict that the Dutch regard as effectively their second war of independence, fought overwhelmingly against the French.

The same is true of the colonial conflicts that form the backdrop of The Mountain of Gold, the second book in the series. Anglocentric sources have sometimes seen the colonial conflicts of the early 1660s as being primarily between the English and the Dutch, especially in West Africa, but in reality many European powers, including some pretty unlikely ones, were scrabbling desperately to get their hands on slices of colonial action. Much of the action of The Mountain of Gold is set on the River Gambia, but there are allusions to the larger expedition undertaken by Major (later Sir) Robert Holmes in 1663-4 against the Dutch forts on Cape Coast and the Gold Coast. But several of these had only very recently become Dutch; until 1663 several of them had been Swedish and bore Swedish names like Carolusborg. There were a number of Danish outposts, too, and the French had already established Fort St Louis, later Dakar, which features in The Mountain of Gold. Perhaps most bizarrely, the Duchy of Courland – which occupies part of the land area of modern Latvia – held St Andrew’s Island in the Gambia River, although this was sold to the Dutch shortly before the Holmes expedition arrived and conquered it, turning it into James Fort (which later became an important centre of the slave trade). Having made a few slight tweaks to the chronology, I’ve used the Courland element in the book; indeed, the climactic battle takes place on St Andrew’s Island. But this was not the sole extent of Courland’s imperial ambitions: Duke Jakob, a godson of King James VI & I, also acquired the island of Tobago, although this was abandoned to the Dutch in 1666.

Of course the larger nations had also established themselves in north America, not always successfully. New Sweden, established in 1638, was a quite extensive colony along the River Delaware, including parts of the modern states of Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. But during the Northern War of the 1650s, the Dutch moved against this colony and overran it in 1655. Their triumph was brief: in 1664 ‘New Netherland’ was conquered in turn by the British, and part of the former Swedish colony was sold to Sir George Carteret, a colleague of Pepys on the Navy Board (and who appears as a minor character in The Mountain of Gold), who named his territory after the Channel Island which he called home, thus establishing New Jersey. Meanwhile Colonel Richard Nicholls had led an expedition to annex the small Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, which was duly renamed New York after Nicholls’ patron, the Lord High Admiral and brother of King Charles II. The Nicholls expedition is recreated in Broadside, an excellent but regrettably little seen documentary in which I participated.

By coincidence, the two effective ‘creators’ of New Jersey and New York both lie buried about five miles apart, just a short distance from where I live in Bedfordshire. Carteret lies in a fairly bland family vault at Haynes church (right), but Nicholls’ memorial (below), in St Andrew’s Church, Ampthill, is spectacular. A florid Latin inscription describing how he removed the Dutch from New York (‘belgis expulsit’) is surmounted by the Union flag and the stars and stripes flanking the actual cannonball that killed him while he was attending upon the Duke of York during the first naval battle of the misnamed third Anglo-Dutch war, the battle of Solebay on 28 May 1672. My geographical proximity to these two memorials to the colonial conflicts of the 1660s was one of the factors that inspired the plot of The Mountain of Gold.

Of Mountains and Gold

by

The second Quinton novel, The Mountain of Gold, comes out in hardback in North America on 31 January and in paperback in the UK on 13 March, and in the buildup to both launches I’ll be blogging about some of the background to the book. I’ll also be blogging about the story behind the third book in the series, The Blast That Tears The Skies, which comes out in trade paperback format in the UK on the same day, 13 March.

Two very real aspects of history underpin the plot. The first is the deterioration of relations between Charles II’s British kingdoms and the United Provinces of the Netherlands which would culminate in the outbreak of the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665-7). The conclusion of the first war in 1654 had left many loose ends: the Dutch objected to the English Navigation Act, which banned them from the carrying trade with England’s colonies, and the English were suspicious of Dutch encroachments in America and Africa which seemed to threaten their own expansionist ambitions. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, a new set of imperatives came into play. Many in the court and in Parliament detested the Dutch state’s republican government and its brand of tolerant Calvinism, young Cavaliers were eager for an opportunity to prove themselves in battle, while influential veterans of the Commonwealth’s war against the Dutch, notably George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, were keen to resume what they regarded as the unfinished business of the earlier conflict. The diary of Samuel Pepys, who enters the series as a character in this novel, provides an excellent insight into the attitudes of the time, and the gradual slide into war. In February 1664, for example – during the time period covered by The Mountain of Gold – the merchant Captain Cocke held forth to Pepys in a coffee house: ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must down’.

Set alongside this escalating tension and inexorable drift toward war, in the novel’s plot as in the history of the time, is the legend of ‘the mountain of gold’. Of course, there was nothing new in wild stories of fabulous golden cities and the like, the riches of which would at once solve any nation’s financial problems: witness Sir Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado earlier in the century, and the persistence of such myths would later underpin such stories as King Solomon’s Mines. The story goes back to 1648, when part of Parliament’s navy defected to the royalists. In 1651 this force, by now much reduced, was operating on the coast of West Africa, and its commander, Prince Rupert of the Rhine (formerly a dashing cavalry general in the British civil war), heard rumours of the existence of a golden mountain, far up the Gambia river. Rupert proceeded some way upstream with a force that included Robert Holmes, the future admiral, knight and foe of Pepys, who was granted his first command during this expedition and who appears as a major character in The Mountain of Gold. After the Restoration, Rupert persuaded the king to back two expeditions to West Africa. These were both commanded by Holmes and were nominally under the auspices of the newly formed Company of Royal Adventurers, later renamed the Royal African Company, which played a controversial part in the history of slavery. The first expedition, in 1661, was aimed at the Gambia and was explicitly an attempt to find the ‘mountain of gold’; the second, in 1663-4, was a much more ambitious attempt to drive the Dutch from the Guinea coast.

In The Mountain of Gold, Captain Matthew Quinton finds himself thrust into the heart of both the drift to war and the quest for the legendary treasure. While cruising in the Mediterranean he captures a man who appears to be a Barbary corsair captain. In fact this proves to be an Irish renegade, Brian Doyle O’Dwyer, who convinces King Charles II that he – and only he – knows the true location of the fabled golden mountain. Despite his reluctance, scepticism and desire to prevent his brother’s marriage to a suspected murderer, Matthew is given command of an expedition to find the mountain. Combining actual elements of both the Holmes expeditions, the novel sees Matthew and his crew travel up the Gambia river, contending as they do so with the wiles of the enigmatic Irishman, attempts to sabotage their ship, murderous natives and wildlife, and above all the machinations of a mysterious and powerful new enemy.

The US hardcover edition of The Mountain of Gold can be pre-ordered here, the UK paperback edition here – and of course from good independent bookshops too!